page_title: Abel Clarin de la Rive
section_title: Involvement in the Taxil hoax
hierarchical_section_title: Abel Clarin de la Rive / Biography / Involvement in the Taxil hoax
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Portrait de Sophia Walder publié dans La femme et l'enfant dans la franc-maçonnerie universelle d'Abel Clarin de la Rive
context_page_description: Abel Clarin de la Rive was a French historian, essayist, journalist, and anti-Masonic writer.
context_section_description: From 1893 on, under the pseudonym of Abel Clarin de la Rive, Vivant emerged as a Catholic journalist and crusader against Freemasonry, writing for the national Catholic newspaper La Croix and for the specialized anti-Masonic magazine La Franc-Maçonnerie demasquée (Freemasonry Unmasked), founded by the French Catholic bishop Amand-Joseph Fava.
  Clarin became a friend of Léo Taxil and one of the many victims of the Taxil hoax. A former Freemason who claimed in 1885 to have converted to Catholicism, Taxil revealed in his books and articles that Freemasonry was secretly controlled by Satanists known as Palladists, and that two high priestesses called Diana Vaughan and Sophia Walder were competing for the leadership of Palladism. Later, Taxil claimed that Diana Vaughan had converted to Catholicism and had started publishing anti-Masonic books and tracts, in fact written by Taxil himself. Many Catholics believed in the Taxil hoax, although some anti-Masonic writers didn’t, and repeatedly asked Taxil to introduce the elusive Diana Vaughan to the public. He promised to do so in a lecture in Paris scheduled for April 19, 1897, where instead he announced that his revelations were a hoax created to show to the world how gullible Catholics hostile to Freemasonry were.
  Clarin de la Rive was among those who believed in Taxil without reservations, and Taxil authorized him to publish in his book La Femme et l’enfant dans la franc-maçonnerie universelle (Women and children in universal Freemasonry), published in 1894, a "genuine portrait" of Sophia Walder, a character not less fictitious than Diana Vaughan. She appeared as masculine, as Taxil had claimed she was a lesbian and so commanded the stereotypes of that time. The book is largely based on Taxil’s spurious revelations, but Clarin had studied sex magic before meeting Taxil and added his own speculations on sexual rituals allegedly practiced by the Palladists. 
  While Taxil was cautious in connecting Palladism and Freemasonry with the Jews, and campaigned in the 1890 Paris municipal elections against the antisemitic leader, Édouard Drumont, Clarin de la Rive claimed in his 1895 book Le Juif et la franc-maçonnerie (Jews and Freemasonry) that both Palladism and Freemasonry were secretly controlled by Jews, and that Palladism was based on the Jewish Kabbalah.
caption: Sophia Walder as portrayed in Clarin’s La Femme et l’enfant dans la franc-maçonnerie universelle
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